While President George W. Bush has maintained neutrality among contenders for the Republican presidential nomination, he privately expresses to friends his exasperation with Mitt Romney’s hard-line stance on immigration.

Bush is upset that Romney changed his position on the issue, compared to what it had been when he was governor of Massachusetts, at the expense of the president’s immigration reform. Bush and Sen. John McCain are not close, but the president is grateful for McCain’s support on Iraq and immigration.

A footnote: The president’s younger brother, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, has not endorsed any presidential candidate. But he and his political allies were behind Romney’s losing effort in last Tuesday’s Florida primary.

Remind me again which party’s presidential nomination John McCain is running for?

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In Arizona, as I’ve noted here before, there is significant anti-McCain sentiment. The Washington Post catches up to it today:

“We do not consider him a conservative at all,” says Rob Haney, a Republican Party chairman in McCain’s home district. The candidate’s bus, the Straight Talk Express, should be renamed, Haney says: “We call it the Forked Tongue Express around here. He’ll lie about anything.”

Said John Acer, a lawyer who, like Haney, showed up last weekend at a meeting of the Republican state committee in Glendale: “He’s despicable. Dishonest. Duplicitous.” And so it goes, on and on, all these Republicans who wince at the mention of McCain’s name, and who can think of few things worse than having the state’s senior Republican senator ascend to the White House.

McCain is likely to win the state’s Republican primary on Tuesday. He wins elections here in Arizona easily. Party activists don’t control the Republicans in voting booths any more than they control the senior senator. But McCain’s in-state problems reflect his national quandary as he tries to convince American conservatives that he’s one of them.